Inside Out is an absurdist video artwork that argues for a queering of the gastrointestinal track. It proposes a gastro-public that takes the center of our body as radically open, communal and anti-humanist. The two screen work follows the format of a lecture, with one screen displaying the artist directly addressing the audience and the other screen displaying images in “support.” This format is constantly interrupted by disjunctive and abstract overlays that rupture and glitch the John Berger style address.

Inside Out is a critique of contemporary biopower, underpinned by neoliberalism, that pushes our inner thoughts, desires and dreams outwards. For instance, in the Ashley Maddison scandal one finds how inner fantasies were commodified and standardized by automated chatbots and cloud based sex workers. But Inside Out is not a call to tactically resist biopower, it schematically seeks to reconsider the assumption of an “inside”. It first argues for an anatomical similarity between the arsehole and nipple, and from this proposes a rhizomatic, trans-community of aligned arseholes and nipples. It then does away with the inside altogether, proposing the human as a torus, or donut, in which the gastrointestinal tract is a public zone. Inspired by the work of Serres, Rancière and Moten & Harney it proclaims a parasitic dissolution of the “human” subject.

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Thanks to Alex Davies, Astrid Lorange and Kirthana Selvaraj for their contribution to the project.